De Passage – a motionless journey between here and elsewhere
The photographic exhibition De Passage , presented at Espace 7 (7 rue Saint-Sabin, Paris 75011) from April 18 to 25, 2025, brings two sensitive worlds into dialogue. Longtime friends Wendel Nazaire and Everdy Ndombaxe conceived this series together as a “still journey,” an exploration of the inner home made visible by their complicit gaze. Their photographs form a common corpus in which their sensibilities intertwine: Wendel works in color, Everdy in black and white. Together, they weave the portrait of a creative friendship, the echo of which can be felt in each image.
Temporality, movement and memory
Each photograph in De Passage seems to capture a fleeting fragment of life. The subjects are often blurred or captured on the spot, as if caught on the doorstep between two places or two moments. This staging gives the exhibition an atmosphere that is both gentle and uncertain, somewhere between silent contemplation and slipping memory. The visitor feels the fluidity of time: each image invites us to meditate on the present moment. As photographer Stephen Wilkes notes, photography can “condense time into a single image” nationalgeographic.fr . Here, each snapshot stolen from time suspends the moment, borrowing from the gaze that of the silent witness of “time passing.” Ultimately, the images together create a feeling of crossing: each photo acts as a bridge between a starting point and a place of arrival, taking the gaze on an intimate journey between past and present.
Diasporic Identity and the Search for Home
Beyond movement, De Passage powerfully explores the question of diasporic identity and the quest for “home.” Wendel Nazaire and Everdy Ndombaxe each embody a dual belonging: their personal journeys are marked by exile and the search for a connection with their distant roots, while being anchored in the Parisian present. As the Musée de l’Immigration reminds us, the diaspora refers to “populations driven from their country” who “refer to a lost territory, the starting point of a life punctuated by mobility” histoire-immigration.fr . The photographers illustrate this idea by mixing the here and the elsewhere in their images. Sometimes, we find, implicitly, a familiar architectural motif or a detail of everyday life inherited from another culture – all signs that home can be rebuilt beyond borders. Each shot superimposes the immediate and the distant, translating the complexity of an identity woven from several worlds. In this diasporic depth, the photographs evoke not only the story of a journey or the solitude of the uprooted, but also the story of a return and a reinvented reunion. It is the trace of a shared journey and a cultural plurality that shines through in the two artists' view of the world.
Artistic complicity and visual conversation
The complicity between Wendel Nazaire and Everdy Ndombaxe shines through in every image. Friends in life, they have built this exhibition together like a two-voice conversation. Each expresses their own universe, and their works respond to each other as if in a silent dialogue: Wendel's colorful vivacity begins the same stories as Everdy's black and white gravity. This contrast is not accidental: on the one hand, Wendel's rich and warm palette captures the energy of the present and the light of everyday life; on the other, Everdy's black and white exudes a gentle melancholy, like the memory of an ancient world. Their collective gamble makes sense: these two complementary perspectives illustrate the same idea of passage and memory. The juxtaposition of the images then creates a kind of visual music, where each photo responds to the previous one. This mirroring of styles—color against monochrome, brightness against shadow—enriches the emotional scope of De Passage . Ultimately, beyond the themes explored, it is the friendship between the two artists that holds this joint work together. Through their trust and mutual listening, they offer the visitor an intimate, moving, and luminous photographic journey.
To extend the experience, the worlds of Wendel Nazaire and Everdy Ndombaxe can be discovered on Instagram.
Sources: Contemporary analyses highlight that photography can “condense time into a single image” nationalgeographic.fr and that diaspora refers to a “lost territory, the starting point of a life punctuated by mobility” histoire-immigration.fr , notions that shed light on the works of De Passage . These quotes allow us to situate the approach of the two photographers in a broader context of memory and cultural identity.